Dweezy asked whether gluttony could relate to fibers. It is possible that he was asking this tongue-in-cheek, but it is an interesting question.

There are three elements of gluttony. Let us consider them in relation to yarn.

First, gluttony can simply be excess.

April 1 was Flash Your Stash Day. I flashed mine, and I went around to look at some of the other flashers, too. It was light-hearted fun.

But after a while, it began to seem like a celebration of excess.

This yarn is enough, I think, for my knitting for the rest of the year. Now, there are plenty of faster knitters than I, more prolific ones, more devoted ones with less else going on in their lives. Still, if we accept that this is roughly a year’s worth of yarn, then we have to accept that many of the stashflashers have more yarn than they can reasonably knit up in the next decade. Some have enough on hand to cover a sudden ice age.

It is like having a whole stable of boyfriends, or eating an entire cake — more than the reasonable and healthy quantity.

Another form of gluttony is excessive delicacy: wanting everything just so, and being peevish if you cannot get it. The point here is that material things ought not to be so important to us that they rule our tempers. We should not be incapable of taking the rough with the smooth, and should not insist on being pampered to unreasonable degrees.

Can this apply to yarn? Well, there are knitters who will only use Rowan yarns. There are knitting blogs which devote a lot of time to whining about their minor dissatisfactions with one yarn company or another. It is possible to find folks who must have particular knitting paraphernalia, with a depth of emotion rivaling the princess and the pea. Perhaps these are examples of delicacy.

The third form of gluttony is allowing one worldly pleasure to overshadow all others, or to overshadow spiritual pleasures. The danger of this is obvious when food stands in for the company of other people or drink prevents a drinker from having a job or family. But could this apply to fibers?

There is a widespread joke in the knitting blogs about Stash Enhancement eXperiences; I have no comment, you can draw your own conclusions about that. Some of the yarn collectors appear to have allowed the acquisition of yarn to overshadow knitting with the yarn. Are they skipping church or temple to spin their fibers? Losing themselves in the lush softness of all that wool and silk and cotton and falling like drug addicts into a single-minded life of fiber? I don’t know.

The image comes to mind of Dweezy spinning while his partner, his customers, his family members cry. Where is Dweezy? Where is that whimsical humor that brightened our lives before he had a spinning wheel? Why isn’t he updating his xanga more frequently? How will we cope with our split ends, outgrowing roots, and unbecoming hairstyles if he is only spinning and knitting all the time?

Well, I don’t think that this is really happening.

But it could.